Also, my in-laws had computer trouble last Sunday and everyone knows that whenever you mix technology and anyone old enough to have watched The Lawrence Welk Show hilarity ensues. And hilarity = recovery.

So there we were, my husband and I, minding our own business in our kitchen when his mother called from the RV park in Arizona where they are spending the winter. They were having computer problems and happened to sense that 750 miles away, their oldest son’s defenses were low enough to reel him into another rousing session of Let’s Buy Gadgets That Require Technical Savvy And Then Make Our Son Spend Several Hundred Hours Explaining Them To Us Over A Bad Connection.

My in-laws. The ones who think that Vista is a desktop background. My in-laws who spent six months figuring out how to switch their Garmin back to English after my husband programmed it in Russian as a joke. My in-laws, who still haven’t figured out that hitting ctl-alt-dlt twice does not result in one’s computer playing the Windows theme song. 

These are the people who were marooned somewhere in the southwestern desert in an RV and no internet and boy was my mother-in-law hopping mad over it. Especially since the only person in Arizona willing to dodge her fists long enough to help was my father-in-law and his solution to every computer-related problem from networking to gum in the keyboard is ” needs more RAM”.

Anyway, so my mother-in-law and my husband were on the phone for several minutes when it was discovered that my mother-in-law had deleted the firewall.

My husband immediately leaned on our kitchen counter and rubbed a spot between his eyes that only gets rubbed like that when Jehovah’s Witnesses are at the door or his patience is being taxed by unhousebroken animals.

It took about fifteen minutes to determine that his mother had turned her computer on and, when she failed to get the internet, began deleting items that didn’t “sound” critical to the operation of the machine. In between her exasperated outbursts about the “stupid, stupid computer being utterly retarded” my father-in-law wrestled the phone away to assure my husband that everything was under control - he would simply install more RAM.

Meanwhile I played the part of supportive spouse by keeping close and not laughing too loud as my husband struggled to convince his mother to stop fiddling with the control panel and call tech support already.

After half an hour I left to go visit my grandmother. Later that day, as I plopped into the car to make the drive home from Modesto, I received the following text from my husband:

My mom just called me again, apparently she tried to re-install Norton rather than just disable the firewall. She got some installation error & now has no idea what to do, but I did hear my dad in the background suggesting they need more RAM.